Judicial Bamboozlement = Bush justice

[L. Coyote]

Judicial Bamboozlement
Scott HORTON: March 26 - http://harpers.org/archive/2008/03/hbc-90002734

In England of the seventeenth century, the Stuart monarchs gradually found the court system to be entirely too much of a bother. Of course, they would pick the judges and keep them in line with promises of royal favor or the reverse, and they developed the cajoling of juries into a high art form, often enough promising retribution against jurors who failed to render the desired verdict. But the bottom line was that this legal system was simply too unpredictable. Why, it actually dispensed justice in some cases. And that was decidedly not what the monarch desired—or to put it more in the framework of the times, it was the King’s justice that they were after, a particular and personal flavor. So some cures were crafted. One was the use of military tribunals to try cases—tribunals which immediately dispensed the justice that the sovereign desired. And another was the practice of putting prisoners, especially those in political cases, on boats and shipping them off to places where the hated writs of the English courts, and particularly the writ most in disfavor, habeas corpus, did not run—to the Channel Islands, the Isle of Man, and even on occasion to America.

Much of the reign of the Bush dynasty has been an exercise in reliving the mistakes of the seventeenth century, and in short order we have seen Bush resort to each of the techniques of the Stuart monarchs so close to his heart. And now we leap forward some three hundred and fifty years to discover that we have an Administration intent on dispensing not American justice, but Bush justice–and that it’s best doing this with a sleight of hand worthy of a Stuart monarch.

We start once more with the fertile and perverse legal imagination of John Yoo. Among the early memoranda to come out of the Office of Legal Counsel under Yoo were a series devoted to evading the jurisdiction of U.S. courts, and particularly avoiding the reach of the dreaded writ of habeas corpus. ....

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[L. Coyote]

1. visibility kick

[ThomWV]

2. In a wold of fluff now and then you hit the real deal.

Here it is.

[Supersedeas]

3. more light on the darkness that is Bush league justice